Sea Over Bow

by Linda Kenyon

  “It was after hours so we took her to an emergency vet, who sedated her and x-rayed her. Nothing was broken, and there was no internal bleeding. The vet told us to give her painkillers and keep her quiet for a couple of weeks. We weren’t to let her climb stairs or jump up on anything.

  “About a week later, as we were getting ready to go to his sister’s place for Thanksgiving dinner, I said, ‘Should we leave Emily at home? There are a lot of stairs at your sister’s place, and we won’t be able to watch her every minute. And what if her dog tries to play with her and she gets hurt again?’

  “‘That’s it,’ he snapped. ‘It’s over. I want you out right after Christmas.’

  “There was never any doubt that I would have to be the one to go. Brad needed a driveway for his truck and Chester needed a big backyard. I didn’t want to stay in the house alone anyway. It would be too sad.”

  Suddenly there is a loud crash in the galley. We both leap up, but Chris gets there first. The door to the baking cupboard has broken free and everything has spilled onto the floor of the galley — flour, oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar, worst of all. It’s a crunchy, sticky mess.

  “Leave it,” Chris says. “We’ll get it later.”

  We snuggle back in.

  “I don’t really understand what happened,” I tell Chris.

  “The door to the baking cupboard opened,” he says with a straight face.

  I give him a swat. “Not that.

  “Maybe he was fighting to get back some control over his life, some dignity. I would always remind him of how vulnerable he had been, how dependent on me. I had to go. But I think he felt bad about ending things, after all we’d been through together, felt he had to find fault with me to justify his decision. He certainly did a good job of it.

  “‘You’re too fearful,’ he’d tell me. ‘Too needy. Too high maintenance. Too controlling.’ And on and on.”

  You’re out of shape. You should lose some weight. You’re going to wear that?

  I pause, try to quiet the voice in my head.

  “By the time I left, I felt completely worthless. I was afraid to look in the mirror in case there was nothing there.”

  Chris pulls me close to him.

  “I see you,” he whispers. “And I love you.”

  It seems quieter now, or maybe we’ve just grown used to the howling wind, the slap of water against the hull. The boat still rolls and rights, rolls and rights. Chris holds me tightly and we both drift off to sleep.

  What light there was in the cabin has faded by the time I wake up. I slide out from under the blanket and, clutching the handles on the ceiling with both hands, monkey my way over to the nav station and sit down at the desk. I turn up the volume on the VHF radio, listen to make sure the hailing channel is clear, pick up the microphone.

  “Sécurité, sécurité, sécurité. This is the sailing vessel MonArk. We are hove to at — ” I read out the latitude and longitude on the GPS in front of me, then listen. No response, not even a bit of static.

  Suddenly a big gust of wind heels us over. Surely it’s at least fifty knots? Maybe more? The boat rights itself, and I can hear water streaming out through the scuppers. We’re okay. For now. But the gale isn’t letting up. And it’s getting dark. And we’re alone out here.

  But I’ve never felt less alone.

  June 15

  Day 25

  “We’ve got to get moving.”

  “Huh?” I had been sound asleep.

  “The wind has dropped,” Chris says. He’s already climbing the companionway ladder. “We’ve got to put out more sail.”

  I follow Chris above deck and see that there’s no longer enough wind in the tiny bit of sail we have up to keep us stable. We’re taking the waves on the bow, on the beam, on the bow again as we bounce around. Chris starts the engine, then moves the main over to the starboard side.

  “We need to bring the genoa across,” he says, loosing the sheet on the port side.

  I grab the handle, crank in the sheet on the starboard side. He eases more sail out until we are balanced. Then, as we pick up speed, he adjusts our heading until he finds the most comfortable path through the waves. Fortunately, it turns out to be more or less in the direction of Flores. Unfortunately, we have drifted twenty-two miles farther away from the island.

  Chris takes the first watch. I’m still a little nervous about the weather, don’t quite trust that it’s all over. Eighteen hours, I think as I finally drift off to sleep. The gale lasted eighteen hours.

  I sleep soundly until 3:00 am, then relieve Chris and let him sleep. As morning breaks, the clouds that slowly emerge from the darkness are hazy at sea level but distinctly rounded higher up, dark blue above, lighter blue and white and almost yellow down below. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  But the weather seems to clear a little as the day wears on. There are even a few brief sunny periods. We don’t even try to clean up down below — we just sprawl in the cockpit, take turns napping on the bench. And I don’t bother making any food — neither of us feels at all like eating. We just nibble on crackers, drink as much water as we can. We’ll make landfall in the morning, we can clean up then, eat some real food. But not before we fall into bed together and sleep and sleep and sleep.

  As dusk falls, I make us some tea, then send Chris below to try to get some sleep before his night watch. The clouds still look strange. I’m almost relieved when the light fails and I can’t see them any more. The wind seems to be dropping. Just seventy-nine miles to go. Our last night at sea. We should be able to see Flores when dawn breaks.

  I unzip the canvas windscreen, step up on the cockpit benches, lean on the dodger. It’s cold, but I want to feel the wind in my hair, watch the bow cutting through the waves, sending water foaming along the sides of the boat.

  “Look at me!” I shout. The wind snatches my words away. “I’ve been through a proper North Atlantic gale.”

  June 16

  Day 26

  Chris has had a quiet watch, and I’m hoping for the same. Around 2:00 am the wind suddenly dies, and I think, good, we’re out of it now, I’ll bet when morning comes, the dark clouds will have disappeared. But an hour later, the wind suddenly starts to build.

  I call Chris to help me reduce sail. We crank in the genoa almost all the way, tie a third reef in the main, just in time. A wall of wind hits us, like nothing either of us has ever felt before, on land or at sea. It must be at least sixty knots, well beyond gale force, verging on hurricane force winds.

  “We need to heave to now,” Chris says.

  I don’t like the edge in his voice.

  I brace myself, and as we crest the next wave, Chris turns us into the wind. We need the bow to come across the wind in order to backwind the foresails and stall our forward motion, but it doesn’t happen. As we come up on the wind, the boat picks up speed and heels over sharply, but the tiny slip of genoa we have out is too much. We can’t get across. As the wave passes under us, the boat rolls on its side, the mast at a forty-five-degree angle to the water. A winch handle slides out of the cockpit, bounces on the cap rail and disappears into the foaming seas. The mainsail is flogging uncontrollably, the boom banging back and forth. The foresails are blocking its wind. Can the rig take this pounding? The boat is actually shuddering, something I’ve never felt before. I glance down the companionway at the abandon-ship kit.

  When the wave has passed under us, Chris eases the wheel and we fall off the wind. The boat rights itself somewhat, and the main fills with wind. We’re back where we started.

  “We need to take in all of the genoa,” Chris says, but he can’t leave the helm.

  It’s not safe for me to go forward, so I have to crank it from the cockpit, inch by inch.

  “Okay, now hold on,” Chris says, needlessly. I’m holding on as hard as I can. “We’re going to try again.”

&nbs
p; As we reach the top of the next wave, we heel over more than I would have thought possible, then suddenly we’re across the wind. The mainsail tacks itself and fills with wind and the stormsail backwinds, stalling the boat. Chris turns the rudder hard so it’s working against the backwinded stormsail, then makes tiny adjustments to the wheel until we’re taking the building seas at the best possible angle.

  This time, Chris doesn’t suggest that we go below. Wordlessly, we watch the rail on the leeward side flirting with the churning seas. My heart sinks. How high will the seas build in these winds? What will we do? I don’t ask. If it doesn’t capsize us, this wind could blow us past Flores, I think grimly, or worse, right onto its rocky cliffs. We can’t reduce sail any further. Oh — we can. We watch as the wind tears our stormsail to shreds.

  I’ve had enough of this. Maybe I’m not as brave as I thought.

  You’re not.

  “Leave me alone,” I mutter.

  Then the wind dies as suddenly as it came up.

  We can’t believe our luck. Chris switches on the engine and starts motoring cautiously in the direction of Flores through very confused seas. I sit numbly beside him on the cockpit bench, staring through the windscreen. It’s just starting to get light. The strange-coloured clouds are gone, replaced by low, ugly clouds. We can’t see more than a mile ahead of us, if that.

  We pick up Flores on the radar long before we can see it. On a clear day, the guidebook says, you can see Flores from forty miles away. We are just four miles from the island and we can’t see anything but a dark bank of clouds where Flores should be.

  Then I spot a funnel of white rising from the sea up into the dark clouds. Now what? A waterspout? Chris unzips the windscreen to get a better look, then he grins.

  “Take a look.”

  What we’re seeing is a waterfall plunging down the face of a cliff. Land! We’re seeing land for the first time in almost a month. We have crossed 2,300 miles of ocean and ended up exactly where we wanted to be. Sure, we have a chart plotter, but the charts for the ocean aren’t very detailed. And we have a GPS to confirm our position, and paper charts to mark where we are. But our arrival here is still a wonder to me. To both of us, I think.

  It takes us several hours to sail the length of Flores to the town of Lajes, the nearest shelter (the only real shelter) for sailboats. The island rises sharply from the sea, and much of the shoreline is studded with huge chunks of rock that have fallen from the cliffs, jagged teeth sticking out of the water. Where they’re not sheer rock, the cliffs are covered in lush green foliage. Every inch of the land above, right to the edges of the cliffs, is divided into neat fields, lined with hedges and low stone walls. From the sea, it looks like a crazy quilt, the patches all different shades of green. We pass a tiny village, a handful of stone houses clinging to the top of a cliff. All the buildings have bright red roofs.

  Lajes used to be a small, unprotected whaling port, but then a modern jetty was built for cargo boats and the ferries that run between islands, creating a small, deep-water anchorage behind it. Chris is concerned that in these confused seas, we may have trouble making the tight turn into the harbour, and we do have an anxious moment when we have to take the seas on the beam, but the boat just rolls, then rights itself once we’re inside the stone jetty. To our dismay, the tiny anchorage is full — we aren’t the only boat seeking shelter here.

  “What do you think?” he says. “Between the American boat and the boat from the U.K.?”

  “Looks pretty tight.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have much choice. There’s room for us to fall back behind them a bit. We’ll be pretty close to the quay, but that will make for a shorter dinghy ride to shore.”

  Chris glances down at the depth reading. “Holy cow,” he says. “Fifty feet. We’re going to have to let out all of our chain.” He gives me the wheel, goes forward to drop anchor. “Just keep us on the wind.”

  I try, but the wind keeps shifting around. I’m glad when we fall back a little, out of range of the boats beside us. I keep a careful eye on the quay behind us. We’re not used to having solid objects around us.

  At the sound of our chain running out, people appear on the decks of the boats already at anchor.

  “You sailed through this?” one man shouts, incredulous.

  We did. And we look like we did.

  I have photos of us taken just before we made landfall. We are both wearing our yellow rain gear, looking none the cleaner for the long journey. Chris has about a week’s worth of whiskers on his face and his hair is plastered to his head. He looks exhausted, but he’s smiling, and there’s a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

  It’s impossible to gauge the state of my hair. It’s all tucked up under my lucky Herbert Fisheries cap, and I have the hood of my raincoat up. I had been looking out the open side panel, watching the island emerge from the gloom, but I’ve turned to look at Chris. My face is wet with rain or salt spray, it’s hard to say which, and my cheeks are pink with the cold, but I’m smiling — looking a bit smug, actually. We did it! We did it.

  LANDFALL

  By the time the anchor is set, the officials are waiting on the quay. Our first impulse is to fall into bed and sleep for a day, but the Portuguese are very strict about marine protocol — the captain must go ashore and clear in. We launch the dinghy, which has been lashed upside down on the foredeck since we left Antigua. Then Chris grabs our papers, runs his fingers through his hair, climbs down the ladder, and he’s off.

  I’m not happy that we’re hanging with our stern towards shore. I sit in the cockpit, keeping a careful eye on the stone quay behind us. If we drag, we’ll be on it in no time. But so far, the anchor seems to be holding.

  It feels so strange to be still — well, relatively still, anyway. And to have something to look at other than water and sky. The new jetty is ugly — a long finger of concrete sticking out into the ocean, big pieces of formed concrete tumbled along the outside edge to break the waves. But it protects us from the huge ocean swell and confused seas. The harbour is wide open to the east, though, which is where the wind is coming from. For the most part, we’re staying nose to the wind, taking the waves on the bow, but from time to time the boat dances around as a gust of wind plunges down the high cliffs that line the coast.

  It also feels strange to be alone after a month at sea with this man. I feel like my arm or a leg or certainly a piece of my heart has just left in a dinghy. I scan the quay, hope he’s made it safely — yes, there he is, talking to a man wearing a navy jacket and a peaked cap.

  I check the anchor again, then settle back with the binoculars and study the cliffs that line the shore. Narrow, jagged plumes of water plunge over the top of them. I wonder if they are always there or just appear when there’s been a heavy rain. They’re not waterfalls, really, more like downspouts. The seabirds that nest on the cliffs here aren’t happy about them. They circle the harbour, calling angrily. Or maybe that’s how they always sound.

  On the jagged rocks at the base of the cliffs, I notice a rusty steel sailboat being slowly pounded to pieces. Did they drag anchor? I wonder. Or maybe their engine failed as they were trying to claw their way out of the harbour in a gale like the one we just came through. Imagine making it all the way across the ocean only to be shipwrecked this close to shore. I hope they got off safely.

  Before long Chris is back.

  “We’re in,” he says. He checks the pattern the boat is making on the chart plotter as we swing from side to side. A nice black semicircle, a smile. The anchor is well and truly set.

  “Come on. Let’s go for a quick walk before we crash.”

  It takes me a few minutes to find my running shoes. I put on a cleaner shirt, one I haven’t slept in, run a hand through my hair — I know I’m a mess, but I can’t wait to get ashore.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chris knows the way now. He heads
for the old slipway, tucked behind the quay. There are steps on one side, which allow people to climb ashore regardless of the tide. Well, not exactly regardless. You have to take a lot more care at low tide. The bottom steps, which are underwater most of the time, are covered with green slime. Chris noses the dinghy up to them and holds it against them with the engine while I step ashore with the line. I’m glad I took the time to put on my running shoes. My first step on European “soil” is a slippery one. I manage to keep my feet as I hold the dinghy close enough for Chris to disembark.

  “Ewww,” he says, wiping slime from his hand.

  He ties the line to a rusty iron ring — how old, I wonder — and we carefully make our way up the steps to the foot of the old sea wall. I can’t believe this used to be the village’s only protection from the wild North Atlantic. I’m sure that in the gales of winter, waves break over this twenty-foot-high wall, even with the new jetty. I don’t think those drainage holes along the top are just for rainwater.

  We begin the long climb to the village, the ground swaying beneath our feet. Up and up we go, stopping to rest from time to time. We’ve been at sea for almost a month. The farthest we’ve walked is forty-three feet, and that not very often. I feel lightheaded and a little ill. I’ve heard that it takes as long to get your land legs as it does to get your sea legs, so I’m in for at least three days of this. But I don’t care. I’m happy to be on solid ground, to be walking on cobblestone for the first time in my life. I am in Europe, or at least a tiny fragment of Europe out in the Atlantic Ocean.

  We stop at the library to send a quick email home — we made it! — and find a message from Chris Parker in our inbox.

  “It appears the low does not dip as far south as I thought… so you get clobbered by the front overnight tonight. Expect 40-knot winds and squalls late this evening. Hang on… it only lasts 6–12 hours, then things moderate.”